bj101

Bib

bj101

FastBikerBoy

I have definitely woken up in an alternate universe this morning. Why on earth would a customer be loyal?

I couldn't agree more.  It baffles me why certain people come on here year after year complaining about Sonar.

Really? The two of you have never heard the term customer loyalty? Huh. I held the top spot in the Fortune 500 company I used to work for, for customer loyalty, 5 years in a row. Then I left, or I still would have hold of the title, and it's part of your review now at that company. They called it 'Customer Retention', but it's the same thing. They kept track of how many customers came back to renew their maintenance contracts, and purchase new equipment from our company. It was a sales and service based company, and service 100% directly effected whether or not existing customers stayed loyal to you. You could, and we did on several occasions, give someone an office full of equipment for free, and because the service sucked ... they refused to take it. We lost people who had been with us for 10 years and more because a technician went in there and in 2 months pissed them off so much they went with someone else.

The thing with Cakewalk is, we are never told something is buggy. We see all these cutsie video's by these guys that show how awesome the next version of Sonar is, and how well it works, and how great your work flow will be now. Then you get Sonar, for example X1, and some of the very things they showed in their video's were broken. Flat out not working. But yet, we keep being led to believe that Sonar is being shipped as advertised and works great.

I have a Ford Focus, and love it.  When I next buy a car, I will try another one.  If I buy a new model and it's terrible, I will think twice about getting another.  I would not keep trying them and complaining on some Ford Focus forum, I'd just buy a different car.

Yeah, well, we're not talking about something with moving and mechanical parts that wear out. We're talking about a software tool that does a very specific job that hasn't done what it was advertised to do in quite some time.

I, like many others, found Sonar X1 stable, especially X1d, which was rock solid FOR ME.  When X2 came out, I bought it because I'd been so happy with X1.  I didn't initially use it for paying work, as new software is often buggy.  After the quick fix, X2 became very stable for me.

So, you're not loyal, but you're ok going in to a purchase that only has a 12 month life cycle, knowing it's going to be broken, and hope and pray they get some of the bugs fixed before they discontinue it's life cycle and force you to buy the next upgrade? And you keep doing this over and over? Call me crazy, but that sounds like Customer Loyalty to me. Y? N?

If X1 had been bad for me, I wouldn't have updated, and would be looking elsewhere.

I see you joined in 2011, so I don't know how much time you've had with Sonar products ... but if you had many years in to learning the software like some of us, you'd have a better understanding of what we're talking about I think. Or not. I don't know. Does it really matter?



@Freddie: Sucks to be on this side of the fence doesn't it?

1:  Thank you for the lesson in "Customer Loyalty", I was aware of its meaning, but thank you anyway.  You talk about your customers returning in your old job because they were getting excellent service.  If your service was bad, they didn't return.  I think you (probably deliberately) misunderstood Karl's post.  He explains it to you a few posts above this.
 
2:  The car thing was an analogy, and analogies do not transfer 100 per cent.  Sonar doesn't run on petrol or have a horn, either, but the central point still holds true - you only remain "loyal" to a company if you get good service/products.  I'm sorry if I did not state this simply enough for you.
 
3:  I don't remember saying anything of the sort about knowingly buying buggy software.  I think you are getting more confused at this point.  I said that I wouldn't use any software (or hardware, for that matter) for work until I had tested it.  That's common sense and good business practise.  Crazy was not the word I had in mind, no.
 
4:  I've been using Sonar since Sonar 6, and have invested much time in learning, and re-learning it.  However, if it were running terribly for me, I would still move on and learn another.  I need it to be working, and for me it is.
 
Thank you for your comments.  If you're unclear about anything else, feel free to ask.

jb101

GlennP


Jb101 just to clarify something here, I posted 56 before I read 55 OK? 

No, I'm sorry.  Perhaps I could have used a better analogy.
 
Mind you, as to jumping in a Corsa and just driving away, you should have seen me in my wife's car today, angrily washing my rear window at the car that pulled out in front of me, instead of flashing my headlights.. 

Danny Danzi


I guess the fix would be maybe a little more interaction from the bakers when they are working on bug fixes? Then again, who knows what it's really like at the bakery. I've noticed they haven't been posting much on here like they usually do.

I'm in the same camp with those of you that wait. I have X2 on another machine so that I can learn it, see where it passes and fails and will not put it on my good boxes until the first real patch comes out that isn't a "quick fix".

That said, I've not had any real problems with X2 since the quick fix. It will always depend on what system you use as well as how you use the software. I think X1 was way more of an issue when it first came out than X2, but that's just in MY regard. I still can't believe X1 is as good as it is after that initial release. I told myself I'd never put it on my good recording boxes. But low and behold, something about it drew me in and after the last patch, it was definitely a winner for me. I still use 8.5 for a few things but my my hope is that X2 will make me remove 8.5 from my machines because it gives me everything I need.

The quick fix works so well for me I'm half tempted to install X2 on my good boxes...but I'm going to wait it out. Anyone installing it on a work machine should make sure they have a few work machines in case they have a problem. I can't take the chance here as every one of our machines gets used for something just about all the time. An hour of down time can cripple my business here.

As for how Cake does things....I'm not down with some of that, but don't really visit any other DAW forums to know what goes on in the others. I know that we get a release...we find bugs for a few months and a few months before the next Sonar comes out, we usually have a final fix for that version.

I still have a few issues with old bugs that I'd like to see fixed that drive me crazy from time to time. Who knows, maybe they can't be fixed or they would have been by now? But I'll say this...Sonar seems to work right for me for the most part so I stick with it because I know it pretty good. It's been so reliable for me (once it's all bug fixed up) that I notice I'm ctrl/S'n a lot less these days due to the fear of crashing.

Now with X2, I am constantly saving just in case. But on X1 and 8.5, I've worked purposely on something for 12 or more hours without a save and it just kept on pushing right with me. Stupid work ethics I know, but sometimes I have to prove something to myself. If someone isn't happy with Sonar, they should just switch DAW's and be done with it. What gets me are the people that don't even have it or use that stay on this forum and troll for attention. Don't like the software, don't like the forum, don't like the forum members, don't like the company....go haunt another DAW forum. That's what I'd do. :)

-Danny

Jonbouy

I don't think there is anything like the panic there was just to get things working so I'm predicting a really good and rounded update to X2 this time around.
 
We'll see.

Beepster


You know what would be nice is if maybe Roland/Cakewalk started building (or contracting out) Sonar boxes that are geared completely towards running Sonar effectively. Sadly I'm sure they'd probably charge far too much for them.

Anderton

Beepster


You know what would be nice is if maybe Roland/Cakewalk started building (or contracting out) Sonar boxes that are geared completely towards running Sonar effectively. Sadly I'm sure they'd probably charge far too much for them.

I've often mentioned in these forums that I truly believe one of the main reasons why Sonar is so stable of me is because I use a computer integrated specifically for audio from PC Audio Labs. They even test the machine with the software you use before they ship it out. I've also used computers integrated for audio from Rain and ADK and have had equally good results. (The other element that seems to really help stability is choosing carefully among plug-ins). So, in a way, there already ARE computers that are integrated specifically for running heavy-duty audio applications. Windows comes tweaked and all that too.

I hate sounding like a "Sonar X2 works great for me!!" Polyanna, but...Sonar X2 works great for me. I've been pushing it really hard for about a month now on several projects, and yes, there have been occasional issues but I've been able to either solve them or come up with a non-obstrusive workaround. I really think this has more to do with the hardware than anything else.

Any modern DAW, including Sonar, is a precision machine and needs a precision computer to run properly and consistently.